Adrian Matejka will revisit '80s-era Indianapolis at Butler event

Adrian Matejka is kidding when he refers to poetry as "the caboose" of literature, but the art form's stature always could use a boost.

A Pike High School alum who now teaches at Indiana University, Matejka (rhymes with "Eureka") mentions 2015 was the first time two poets won the national and regional prizes at the Indiana Authors Award ceremony. Marianne Boruch won the former, and Matejka won the latter.

“One of those rare moments we got to come out into the sunlight,” he said. “It was great.”

A 2014 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, Matejka concedes some poetry deserves to be perceived as unapproachable or too abstract

"There’s a race to be obscure sometimes," he said. "Because if you’re obtuse, that means you must really know what you’re doing. In fact, real poets offer themselves up. They offer up an experience that’s inclusive and immediate and friendly."

"Map to the Stars" is set in 1980s Indianapolis, where an adolescent copes with being broke while also obsessing about outer space. Matejka, who grew up near the intersection of 71st Street and Georgetown Road, said the city deserved to be a character in the poems.

"People do this all the time in New York," Matejka said. "There are entirely too many books about Brooklyn. They do it about Chicago. Raymond Chandler had Los Angeles."

One "Map to the Stars" poem, "Ascendant Blacks," pays tribute to Guion Bluford, the first African-American astronaut to travel into space.

"I remember how ecstatic I was when it was time for a Space Shuttle launch," Matejka said. "Sitting around, geeking out and waiting for this thing to happen. It all pointed toward this future that was going to be different and better and more sophisticated. In a lot of ways it is. But we as human beings haven’t really evolved as much as I hoped we would have alongside that technology."

The father of an 11-year-old daughter, Matejka said Reagan-era kids experienced the end of an era.

"We were the last generation that wasn’t super-saturated in connective technology," Matejka said. "We had video games, but not video games you could play with somebody who was in London while you were sitting in Bloomington. My daughter’s childhood is in pixels in a way that mine was not."

Matejka, who teaches a course titled the Poetics of Rap Music at IU, will speak Sept. 2 at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

His 2013 book "The Big Smoke," a collection of poems inspired by early-20th century boxing champion Jack Johnson, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award — a prize awarded by a panel of judges including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Joyce Carol Oates and Rita Dove.

“Dr. Martin Luther King won the Anisfield-Wolf," Matejka said. "Toni Morrison and people like that. To put my name in that conversation doesn’t make sense. One of these kids is not like the others. It was a great honor.”